Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Many of us have made the point on many occasions. Yesterday,
Caitlyn Flanagan made it clearly and forcefully in The Atlantic.

Her point: that the liberal Democratic establishment and
what she calls “machine feminism” bears responsibility for the epidemic of sexual harassment by progressive feminist men. Led by the enabler in chief
herself, these leftist feminists rushed out to defend Bill Clinton against
credible charges of sexual assault, sexual harassment and rape.

Flanagan describes Clinton’s crimes:

Yet let
us not forget the sex crimes of which the younger, stronger Bill Clinton was
very credibly accused in the 1990s. Juanita Broaddrick reported that when she
was a volunteer on one of his gubernatorial campaigns, she had arranged to meet
him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, he had changed the location to
her room in the hotel, where she says he very violently raped her. She said she
fought against Clinton throughout a rape that left her bloodied. At a different
Arkansas hotel, he caught sight of a minor state employee named Paula Jones,
and, Jones says, he sent a couple of state troopers to invite her to his suite,
where he exposed his penis to her and told her to kiss it. Kathleen Willey said
that she met him in the Oval Office for personal and professional advice and
that he groped her, rubbed his erect penis on her, and pushed her hand to his
crotch.

It was
a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged violent assault; the women
involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious
accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks. But Clinton was not
left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have
experienced. Rather, he was rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism.
The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation and it was
willing—eager—to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.

While Hillary Clinton was out
front attacking the women who had dared accuse her husband, and whose charges,
if true, would have seriously compromised her own quest for the presidency,
Gloria Steinem stepped forth to defend Bubba:

The notorious
1998 New York Times op-ed
by Gloria Steinem must surely stand as one of the most regretted
public actions of her life. It slut-shamed, victim-blamed, and age-shamed; it
urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused. Moreover
(never write an op-ed in a hurry; you’ll accidentally say what you really
believe), it characterized contemporary feminism as a weaponized auxiliary of
the Democratic Party….

And
then she wrote the fatal sentences that invalidated the new understanding of
workplace sexual harassment as a moral and legal wrong: “Even if the
allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is
accused of having made a gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a
low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened
again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.”

As I have often noted, the liberal response to Clinton’s
behavior paved the way for Harvey Weinstein:

The
widespread liberal response to the sex crime accusations against Bill Clinton
found their natural consequence 20 years later in the behavior of Harvey
Weinstein: Stay loudly and publicly and extravagantly on the side of signal
leftist causes and you can do what you want in the privacy of your offices and
hotel rooms.

It’s time, Flanagan concludes, for the Democratic Party to
have its own reckoning, for it to measure how much its willingness to excuse
Bill Clinton gave a green light to other progressive men:

The
Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill
Clinton. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that it was so
enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president and his stunning string of
progressive accomplishments that it abandoned some of its central principles.
The party was on the wrong side of history and there are consequences for that.
Yet expedience is not the only reason to make this public accounting. If it is
possible for politics and moral behavior to coexist, then this grave wrong
needs to be acknowledged. If Weinstein and Mark Halperin and Louis C.K. and all
the rest can be held accountable, so can our former president and so can his
party, which so many Americans so desperately need to rise again.

Life is not looking very good for the Clintons these days. It couldn't happen to nicer people!